What Adobe Commerce Actually Costs

People searching for Adobe Commerce pricing usually want a number, and Adobe doesn’t publish one. That’s frustrating but it’s also slightly beside the point, because on almost every Magento store we’ve looked at, the licence is the smallest part of what the platform costs to own.

Here’s how the pricing works, what it doesn’t include, and the question that actually decides whether you’re paying too much.

How Adobe Commerce licensing works

It’s quoted, not listed. Adobe prices per merchant, and the quote is tiered on your annual gross merchandise value — the more you sell, the higher the tier.

There are two editions. Adobe Commerce (self-hosted) and Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure, which bundles managed hosting on Adobe’s platform at a materially higher tier.

Publicly reported entry points run to tens of thousands of dollars a year, and rise with revenue. Treat any specific figure you find online as a data point from one merchant at one revenue level, not a price list.

Magento Open Source is free to license. It’s the same core platform without the commercial features — B2B, advanced merchandising, customer segmentation, content staging — and without vendor support. Every other cost below applies to it identically.

What the licence doesn’t include

This is the part that matters, and it’s the same whether you’re on Adobe Commerce or Open Source.

Hosting. Magento wants serious infrastructure — dedicated servers or a managed cloud — and someone to run it. On Adobe’s cloud tier this is bundled; everywhere else it’s a monthly line item plus operational time.

Security patching. Patches are frequent, mandatory and occasionally break things. Applying them is developer time; not applying them is how stores get compromised.

Developers. Magento development is a distinct specialism, in shorter supply and at higher rates than Shopify or general web development. A retainer is normal. An in-house Magento developer is a salary.

Extensions. Much of a Magento store’s functionality lives in paid extensions with annual renewals, and extension conflicts after updates are a recurring cost.

Upgrades. Major-version upgrades on Magento 2 are projects — weeks of work, regression testing, and frequently extension replacements — not updates you click.

Add those up over a year. On most stores the licence is not the biggest line, and on Open Source stores the platform costs plenty without a licence at all.

The question that actually decides it

How much of Magento’s depth are you using?

Adobe Commerce is genuinely capable. Its product model — configurable, grouped and bundled products with unlimited attributes — is more expressive than anything hosted. Multi-store is native. The B2B module is serious. You control the code completely.

Merchants who use that depth get value for the cost, and the alternatives would be a downgrade. The alternatives are a downgrade in capability for everyone; the question is whether it’s capability you’d notice losing.

Most merchants we speak to are running a fairly conventional store — a catalog that would fit a hosted platform, one storefront, B2B that customer groups would cover — on enterprise infrastructure. The cost is largely fixed regardless of usage, and that mismatch is the most common reason a Magento merchant ends up in a migration conversation.

If you’re on Magento 1

The cost question is moot. Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020 and receives no security patches. The question isn’t whether to keep paying for it but where to go, and it’s urgent.

Where merchants go

Shopify, for DTC brands with conventional catalogs. The best checkout, the largest app ecosystem, nothing to maintain. The constraint to check first is three options per product — Magento’s configurable products routinely exceed it. See Magento to Shopify and the full comparison.

BigCommerce, for B2B-heavy or catalog-heavy merchants. Customer groups, price lists and quantity breaks are native on a standard plan, far more variants per product are allowed, and it’s hosted. Magento’s complex catalogs land here more cleanly. See Magento to BigCommerce.

Headless, when the storefront itself needs to behave like software — configurators, real-time availability, buying flows that don’t fit a product page. It replaces Magento’s cost with a different kind of commitment. See headless commerce.

Doing the arithmetic

Before renewing, put twelve months of actual cost in one place: licence, hosting, patching and developer time, extension renewals, and the amortised cost of your last major upgrade. Then list the Adobe Commerce features you actively use.

If the second list is short and the first number is large, the migration conversation is worth having — and the product-structure check is where it should start, because that decides the destination. If you’d like a second opinion on either, tell us what you’re running.